Ladytron: Difference between revisions
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'''Ladytron''' are an [[electronic music]] band originally formed in [[Liverpool]], England. Ladytron formed in the summer of 1999 when Liverpool musicians and DJs [[Reuben Wu]] and [[Daniel Hunt (musician)|Daniel Hunt]] met dual singers Glaswegian [[Helen Marnie]] and Bulgarian-born [[Mira Aroyo]]. The band's name was taken from the [[Ladytron (song)|song of the same name]] by [[Roxy Music]]. |
'''Ladytron''' are an [[electronic music]] band originally formed in [[Liverpool]], England. Ladytron formed in the summer of 1999 when Liverpool musicians and DJs [[Reuben Wu]] and [[Daniel Hunt (musician)|Daniel Hunt]] met dual singers Glaswegian [[Helen Marnie]] and Bulgarian-born [[Mira Aroyo]]. The band's name was taken from the [[Ladytron (song)|song of the same name]] by [[Roxy Music]]. |
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==Biography== |
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The narrative of the past decade of electronic music would not be complete without a chapter on Ladytron — although the Liverpool-born quartet’s global fanbase would argue that the band wrote the book on it. |
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Consistently placing songcraft and innovation over any confining aesthetic, the foursome of Daniel Hunt, Reuben Wu, Helen Marnie and Mira Aroyo fashioned four albums of deliriously buzzing, whip-smart electro-pop that have kept them ahead of the curve, apart from the fads and in a league of their own. |
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“We’ve never fit into one scene, never adhered to one set of rules and never wanted to create anything that was already accepted or in the mainstream,” says Wu now, reflecting on a decade highlighted by principal releases “604” (2001), “Light & Magic” (2002), “Witching Hour” (2005) and “Velocifero” (2008). |
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Those albums, surveyed on the career-spanning “Best of Ladytron: 2000-2010,” reflect the quartet’s deftly executed (and delightfully subversive) dualities: primordial grooves vs. lushly layered synths; sanguine melodies vs. shimmering atmospherics; and art-house detachment vs. the poignant narratives delivered by dueling sirens Marnie and Aroyo. Ladytron has created a body of work that reveals a fresh creative arc — and, as time has told, served as a reference point for a current crop of artists such as Lady Gaga, Goldfrapp, La Roux and Crystal Castles. |
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It started with a batch of Daniel’s songs and a collection of vintage synths. |
|||
Hunt and Wu met in the late 1990s, and through various DJ gigs met Glasgow-born Marnie and Aroyo, a native of Sofia, Bulgaria, in the summer of 1999. Hunt found he shared myriad interests with his new collaborators — French electronica, Krautrock, and various evolutionary dead ends of pop history. It was a strange brew because the landscape at the time was populated by guitar-based alternative rock bands and house music, with little crossover. |
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“There’s just weren’t that many people making pop music with synthesizers. We didn’t invent it, but we did it in a very different way,” Aroyo says. “And people would say, ‘Wow, you use synths and you’re not a dance band.’ It worked in our favor, although we didn’t fit into any genre or trend at the time.” |
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Recalls Wu: “Being involved in music that was not like anything else going on at the time was pretty special.” |
|||
That feeling inspired a heightened sense of experimentation in the early days, when, Hunt acknowledges, Ladytron’s “objectives were very short-term. ‘Let’s make a single.’ ‘OK, people liked it, let’s make another one.’ ‘OK, let’s make an album.’” |
|||
Riding the momentum from early singles, the quartet — newly signed by A&R legend Steve Pross to U.S. label Emperor Norton — released “604” in 2001. The album won acclaim for its evocative synth based production and tight pop songwriting, and Ladytron suddenly was a worldwide phenomenon. |
|||
The buzz surrounding their studio recordings belied the fact that Ladytron were fledglings. Still, a European tour behind “604” gained the quartet some energy, which they quickly unleashed in the studio to make “Light & Magic,” an album that displayed Ladytron’s newly synergistic creative process. |
|||
“Most of the songs on ‘604’ Danny already had, but after that things got more collaborative,” Aroyo says. “When we’re in the studio, we’re surrounded by all these toys we get to work with, and it’s always quite fun and experimental. At the time, we were trying all kinds of things.” |
|||
“Light & Magic” sounded like it, with its more sophisticated melodies, labyrinthine arrangements, varying textures and broad emotional shades adding up to what many consider the band’s landmark album. |
|||
“Seventeen,” “Blue Jeans” and “Evil” became underground hits for a band increasingly enjoying above- ground notice. |
|||
With its sound referencing everything from glam to disco to new wave to European dance music, Ladytron at the time was lumped with the purveyors of another strain of synth-based music popular at the time, electroclash. It was a label the band summarily ignored. |
|||
“We felt being compared to the day-glo trash-aesthetic of electroclash didn’t make any sense,” Hunt says. “We were wise enough to know that being positioned by the press at the forefront of it, despite our protestations, would mean we bore the brunt of the backlash when it inevitably came. However, that happened anyway, and we survived.” |
|||
Ladytron survived by evolving and drawing from even more influences (particularly shoegaze), for their next album “Witching Hour.” As much as anything, the year and a half the foursome spent on the road behind “Light & Magic” informed Ladytron’s third album. |
|||
While Ladytron’s progress was steady with their home audiences, they were certifiable stars when they finally hit North America in 2003. Their first U.S. tour sold out, and they made the first of two appearances at the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival, playing an electrifying set with a lineup expanded to include a live drummer and bass player. They were a force. |
|||
“Adding a drummer and bass player live affected the way we thought about our music. It affected the way we wrote for ‘Witching Hour.’” |
|||
Label issues — the band’s U.S. home Emperor Norton was bought by Rykodisc, and its worldwide imprint Telstar went under — delayed the album’s release a year until the fall of 2005, but no matter: More ambitious than anything the quartet had previously done, and inarguably achieving a grander scale, “Witching Hour” was greeted with almost unanimous acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic, with the banging single “Destroy Everything You Touch” stamped as the band’s signature song. |
|||
“In some ways,” Aroyo says, “it was the first album where we knew exactly what we wanted to sound like.” |
|||
Two sold-out U.S. tours (and another slot at Coachella) followed, and Ladytron was asked to curate the 2006 Ether Festival on London’s south bank. “For the first time, it felt like we were getting recognition for our work in our home country,” Hunt says. “We were no longer a new band, but one with contemporaries" |
|||
Nor were they a band that could rest on its laurels — following the “Witching Hour” tour, the foursome immediately convened to make “Velocifero,” whose sleek, symphonic compositions further mark Hunt, Wu, Aroyo and Marnie as songwriting sophisticates. A long tour for that album was highlighted when Ladytron headlined the Brian Eno-curated Luminous Festival at the Sydney Opera House. |
|||
Weighing Ladytron’s 10 years of artistry against the current landscape — “If you look at pop music eight years after we started, it would've all been called electroclash in 2002,” Hunt notes wryly — only solidifies the quartet’s stature as pioneers of the decade’s revival of synth-based electro. |
|||
“When we started music was very polarized — you were either rock or you were dance, and it seemed revolutionary, and even punk, to make music using these instruments,” Wu says. “Slowly it became ingrained in people’s consciousness that it was acceptable, even natural, to make music this way." |
|||
“Sometime I think, ‘what would happen if we started now, in this decade? How would things be different.’ There’s not a lot of stuff left, really.” |
|||
Except, of course, Ladytron’s fifth studio album, due Summer 2011. |
|||
==Music== |
==Music== |
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Revision as of 23:39, 19 January 2011
 | This article needs additional citations for verification. (May 2010) |
Ladytron |
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Ladytron are an electronic music band originally formed in Liverpool, England. Ladytron formed in the summer of 1999 when Liverpool musicians and DJs Reuben Wu and Daniel Hunt met dual singers Glaswegian Helen Marnie and Bulgarian-born Mira Aroyo. The band's name was taken from the song of the same name by Roxy Music.
Biography
The narrative of the past decade of electronic music would not be complete without a chapter on Ladytron — although the Liverpool-born quartet’s global fanbase would argue that the band wrote the book on it.
Consistently placing songcraft and innovation over any confining aesthetic, the foursome of Daniel Hunt, Reuben Wu, Helen Marnie and Mira Aroyo fashioned four albums of deliriously buzzing, whip-smart electro-pop that have kept them ahead of the curve, apart from the fads and in a league of their own.
“We’ve never fit into one scene, never adhered to one set of rules and never wanted to create anything that was already accepted or in the mainstream,” says Wu now, reflecting on a decade highlighted by principal releases “604” (2001), “Light & Magic” (2002), “Witching Hour” (2005) and “Velocifero” (2008).
Those albums, surveyed on the career-spanning “Best of Ladytron: 2000-2010,” reflect the quartet’s deftly executed (and delightfully subversive) dualities: primordial grooves vs. lushly layered synths; sanguine melodies vs. shimmering atmospherics; and art-house detachment vs. the poignant narratives delivered by dueling sirens Marnie and Aroyo. Ladytron has created a body of work that reveals a fresh creative arc — and, as time has told, served as a reference point for a current crop of artists such as Lady Gaga, Goldfrapp, La Roux and Crystal Castles.
It started with a batch of Daniel’s songs and a collection of vintage synths.
Hunt and Wu met in the late 1990s, and through various DJ gigs met Glasgow-born Marnie and Aroyo, a native of Sofia, Bulgaria, in the summer of 1999. Hunt found he shared myriad interests with his new collaborators — French electronica, Krautrock, and various evolutionary dead ends of pop history. It was a strange brew because the landscape at the time was populated by guitar-based alternative rock bands and house music, with little crossover.
“There’s just weren’t that many people making pop music with synthesizers. We didn’t invent it, but we did it in a very different way,” Aroyo says. “And people would say, ‘Wow, you use synths and you’re not a dance band.’ It worked in our favor, although we didn’t fit into any genre or trend at the time.”
Recalls Wu: “Being involved in music that was not like anything else going on at the time was pretty special.”
That feeling inspired a heightened sense of experimentation in the early days, when, Hunt acknowledges, Ladytron’s “objectives were very short-term. ‘Let’s make a single.’ ‘OK, people liked it, let’s make another one.’ ‘OK, let’s make an album.’”
Riding the momentum from early singles, the quartet — newly signed by A&R legend Steve Pross to U.S. label Emperor Norton — released “604” in 2001. The album won acclaim for its evocative synth based production and tight pop songwriting, and Ladytron suddenly was a worldwide phenomenon.
The buzz surrounding their studio recordings belied the fact that Ladytron were fledglings. Still, a European tour behind “604” gained the quartet some energy, which they quickly unleashed in the studio to make “Light & Magic,” an album that displayed Ladytron’s newly synergistic creative process.
“Most of the songs on ‘604’ Danny already had, but after that things got more collaborative,” Aroyo says. “When we’re in the studio, we’re surrounded by all these toys we get to work with, and it’s always quite fun and experimental. At the time, we were trying all kinds of things.”
“Light & Magic” sounded like it, with its more sophisticated melodies, labyrinthine arrangements, varying textures and broad emotional shades adding up to what many consider the band’s landmark album.
“Seventeen,” “Blue Jeans” and “Evil” became underground hits for a band increasingly enjoying above- ground notice.
With its sound referencing everything from glam to disco to new wave to European dance music, Ladytron at the time was lumped with the purveyors of another strain of synth-based music popular at the time, electroclash. It was a label the band summarily ignored.
“We felt being compared to the day-glo trash-aesthetic of electroclash didn’t make any sense,” Hunt says. “We were wise enough to know that being positioned by the press at the forefront of it, despite our protestations, would mean we bore the brunt of the backlash when it inevitably came. However, that happened anyway, and we survived.” Ladytron survived by evolving and drawing from even more influences (particularly shoegaze), for their next album “Witching Hour.” As much as anything, the year and a half the foursome spent on the road behind “Light & Magic” informed Ladytron’s third album.
While Ladytron’s progress was steady with their home audiences, they were certifiable stars when they finally hit North America in 2003. Their first U.S. tour sold out, and they made the first of two appearances at the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival, playing an electrifying set with a lineup expanded to include a live drummer and bass player. They were a force.
“Adding a drummer and bass player live affected the way we thought about our music. It affected the way we wrote for ‘Witching Hour.’”
Label issues — the band’s U.S. home Emperor Norton was bought by Rykodisc, and its worldwide imprint Telstar went under — delayed the album’s release a year until the fall of 2005, but no matter: More ambitious than anything the quartet had previously done, and inarguably achieving a grander scale, “Witching Hour” was greeted with almost unanimous acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic, with the banging single “Destroy Everything You Touch” stamped as the band’s signature song.
“In some ways,” Aroyo says, “it was the first album where we knew exactly what we wanted to sound like.”
Two sold-out U.S. tours (and another slot at Coachella) followed, and Ladytron was asked to curate the 2006 Ether Festival on London’s south bank. “For the first time, it felt like we were getting recognition for our work in our home country,” Hunt says. “We were no longer a new band, but one with contemporaries"
Nor were they a band that could rest on its laurels — following the “Witching Hour” tour, the foursome immediately convened to make “Velocifero,” whose sleek, symphonic compositions further mark Hunt, Wu, Aroyo and Marnie as songwriting sophisticates. A long tour for that album was highlighted when Ladytron headlined the Brian Eno-curated Luminous Festival at the Sydney Opera House.
Weighing Ladytron’s 10 years of artistry against the current landscape — “If you look at pop music eight years after we started, it would've all been called electroclash in 2002,” Hunt notes wryly — only solidifies the quartet’s stature as pioneers of the decade’s revival of synth-based electro.
“When we started music was very polarized — you were either rock or you were dance, and it seemed revolutionary, and even punk, to make music using these instruments,” Wu says. “Slowly it became ingrained in people’s consciousness that it was acceptable, even natural, to make music this way."
“Sometime I think, ‘what would happen if we started now, in this decade? How would things be different.’ There’s not a lot of stuff left, really.”
Except, of course, Ladytron’s fifth studio album, due Summer 2011.
Music
Ladytron blends electronic pop music and New Wave, using an array of vintage analogue equipment to achieve their distinctive sound. Albums so far have focused on a balance between pop structures and digitally edited analogue electronic sound, along with some more experimental leanings including psychedelic elements.
Touring
The band has a large cult following worldwide, and toured extensively since the release of Light & Magic, intensifying on the Witching Hour and Velocifero albums. They have also on rare occasion opened for other artists; taken by Soulwax onto their UK tour in 2001, Björk in 2003, and across Europe, they opened for Nine Inch Nails in early 2007 at the invitation of Trent Reznor. They also supported Goldfrapp as part of the Eden Sessions at The Eden Project in 2006. The group also play DJ sets in clubs and events around the world.
History
Ladytron's debut album, 604 (2001), was released on the Emperor Norton/Invicta HIFI labels. The single "Playgirl" brought some national and international attention to the band.
Light & Magic (2002) was released to wider exposure and included the underground hits "Seventeen", "Evil", and "Blue Jeans". Following 18 months on tour supporting Light & Magic, Ladytron recorded their third album, Witching Hour (2005). This album saw an augmentation of their sound, leading the album to be described by Pitchfork Media as a "quantum leap record".[2] The album was released with two singles, "Sugar" and "Destroy Everything You Touch". The band were awarded 5 NME singles of the week in the process.[citation needed]
The band finished work on their fourth studio album, Velocifero, in February 2008.[3] It had a full release worldwide on June 3, after making the top 40 through a two week exclusive release on iTunes. Velocifero was recorded in Paris, with the band handling production duties with some collaboration from Alessandro Cortini (Modwheelmood, Nine Inch Nails) and Vicarious Bliss (Justice, DJ Mehdi).[4] Velocifero has been the band's most successful release to date.[citation needed]
The band worked with singer Christina Aguilera on her album Bionic to write the songs "Birds of Prey" and "Little Dreamer", which are featured on the Deluxe and iTunes Special Edition. The album also features contributions from Sia Furler and Santigold.
Ladytron continued the final months of the Velocifero Tour through summer 2009, which contained a headline show at Sydney Opera House as part of the Brian Eno-curated Luminous festival. The Velocifero tour has seen them play the longest run of dates, and to the biggest crowds, in their career so far.
On 20 May 2010, the band announced via their Facebook page that they had finished recording two new tracks, both to be included on a compilation album to be released later in the year. In the same update they also confirmed that recording of their fifth album was about to get underway.
The track Ghosts is the soundtrack for the Electronic Arts Video Game Need For Speed: Undercover, from the album Velocifero. The track Ghosts is also in the Electronic Arts Game The Sims 3 under Custom Music.
The track "Ace of Hz" is featured on the soundtrack for the Electronic Arts Video Game FIFA 11, from the forthcoming album Ladytron 00 - 10.
Remixing
Ladytron have produced remixes for many artists, including Placebo, Blondie, Gang of Four, David Gahan, Goldfrapp, Bloc Party, Kings of Convenience, Indochine, Apoptygma Berzerk, She Wants Revenge, Soulwax, Nine Inch Nails, and Simian.
Discography
Studio albums and soundtracks
- 604 (2001)
- Light & Magic (2002)
- Witching Hour (2005)
- Velocifero (2008)
EPs and compilations
- Miss Black and Her Friends (1999), Bambini, Japan only
- Mu-Tron EP (2000)
- Softcore Jukebox (2003)
- Extended Play (2006)
- The Harmonium Sessions (2006)
- Live At The London Astoria 16.07.08 (2009), live album
Singles
| Year | Title | Peak chart positions | Album | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| UK [5][6] |
U.S. Dance [7] | |||
| 1999 | "He Took Her to a Movie” | — | — | 604 |
| 2000 | "Playgirl" | — | — | |
| "Commodore Rock" | — | — | ||
| 2001 | "The Way That I Found You / Holiday 601" | 102 | — | |
| "Playgirl" (Remix) | 89 | — | ||
| 2002 | "Seventeen" | 68 | — | Light & Magic |
| 2003 | "Blue Jeans" | 43 | — | |
| "Evil" | 44 | — | ||
| 2005 | "Sugar" | 45 | — | Witching Hour |
| "Destroy Everything You Touch" | 42 | — | ||
| "Weekend" | — | — | ||
| 2008 | "Ghosts" | 109 | — | Velocifero |
| "Runaway" | — | 30 | ||
| 2009 | "Tomorrow" | — | — | |
| 2010 | "Ace of Hz" | — | Ladytron 00 - 10 | |
Music videos
| Year | Song | Director | Album |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2000 | "Playgirl" | James Slater/Neil McClean | 604 |
| 2003 | "Seventeen" | David Chaudoir | Light & Magic |
| "Evil"(UK version) | Scott Lyon | ||
| "Evil"(US version) | James Slater/Neil McClean | ||
| "Blue Jeans" | James Slater/Neil McClean | ||
| 2005 | "Sugar" | Andy Roberts | Witching Hour |
| "Destroy Everything You Touch" | Adam Bartley | ||
| 2008 | "Ghosts" | Joseph Kahn | Velocifero |
| "Runaway" | Mike Sharpe & Barney Steele | ||
| 2009 | "Tomorrow" | Neil Krug |
References
- ^ Original synth Sound reasoning behind Ladytron's electronic songs Chicago Sun Times28 February 2003
- ^ Review of The Witching Hour on Pitchfork
- ^ Ladytron complete new album in Paris
- ^ Ladytron reveal details 'Velocifero' album
- ^ "Chart Log UK : DJ Steve L. – LZ Love". zobbel.de. Retrieved 2010-06-06.
- ^ "Ladytron". chartstats.com. Retrieved 2010-06-07.
- ^ Ladytron – Allmusic Charts Allmusic. Retrieved 2010-06-06.
External links
